FormSpring Friday

Hello all! So today I'm posting the first ever set of questions I have received on FormSpring (via that gadget on the right of this blog) and my responses! I'm hoping to make this a weekly thing and message me again if I didn't answer your question - I still haven't figured out how to sort my questions on FormSpring to eliminate the random questions I get from users of that site. But without further ado, here we go!

Anonymous: Could you make a cap about a bible college student being completely transformed into a sexy girl?

Elena: Possibly! It's a unique idea that I haven't tried before, which is generally a positive whenever anyone asks me for a cap, but it'll all come down to whether I have the time/find the right pic for it!

Anonymous: When will you write another story?

Elena: Unsure at the moment. I actually started writing a story based on one of my favorite stories on Fictionmania (basically an homage with a twist), but ran into the old realization that writing a long, quality story can take a lot of time that could have been spent writing multiple captions. As for the old fan favorites series I started like S.H.E.M.A.L.E Starz and Hypnotic Wishes, there is only a slim chance that I will continue/complete these due to loss of images, loss of direction, and loss of interest. But who knows...maybe I'll change my mind one day in the future :)

Anonymous: Nice captions...I LOVE them! ♥

Elena: Thank you! Always nice to hear that people still like what I'm doing!

WesMantooth: Hey, you have an Ask Me Anything widget! Awesome. One of my favorite questions I've been asked was one of yours, so I'll pose it back to you: What are your favorite captions you've made?

Elena: Wow...a big question I posed is coming back to bite me...lol. Well, I went back and looked and couldn't sort out hundreds of my captions to my favorite 10 or even 20...so I've decided to do five post in the coming week or so with my favorite captions of each year I've been blogging! So stay tuned for that...but to not completely cop out on you, my absolute favorite of all time is the series I did for a contest on Rachel's Haven. Just a great story, set of images, and formatting that I'm quite proud of. What do you (Wes and others) like the most from my work?

Anonymous: I'd just like to say that I love your blog so much! It's amazing! How do you come up with so many stories?

Elena: Thanks so much for the kind words! In terms of story-making, it's a combination of three things - an image, an imagination, and experience. It always starts with an image for me. "A picture paints a thousand words" they say, and for me it often determines the direction of the story. That is where imagination comes in - when I see a photo, I generally have an idea that comes with it based on how the model is positioned/looking, what they are wearing/doing, or something else unique that stands out. That usually starts me down the path of the story. The last bit is simply experience - having been writing caps for so long, I generally have a sense of how I want to write/what about, as well as whether I want to repeat/tweak a similar idea that I may have done before.

Anonymous: Is there a story behind your name?

Elena: This might have actually been a generic question posed by FormSpring, but I figure I'd answer it anyways. My name came about for a few different reasons. First, "Elena" is one of the more feminine versions of my name (which doesn't exactly have an easy conversion like Dan/Danielle, but it's close enough). Second, "Elena" was the name of a beautiful blond girl I used to crush on a long time ago that mirrored many of the traits of my favorite models. Finally, before I posted this blog I had already thought of the S.H.E.M.A.L.E Starz series and was looking for feminine names...the "Starz" came about as a good stage name for all my lovely characters, while one of the E first names became (or will become if I ever finish the series) Elena, and I kind of just adopted that surname because it's flashy and different. So that's how I became Elena Starz :)